If Citizens Provide Their Exclusive Breaking News Photos/Video to the Media Then Shouldn’t They Get Paid? Apparently Not!

Philip Stone August 11, 2005

The London bombings brought home the power of amateur photography, still and video. Some of the most dramatic pictures of the bombings themselves came from people on the trains using their mobile phone cameras. The arrest of two suspects was captured on amateur video.
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And yet the vast majority of those people who made their pictures/video available to the media got not one penny for their effort. The media was happy to have the pictures, especially those taken before the professionals could get there, and those who took the pictures were happy to see their pictures shown around the world.

But the fact is a lot of amateur photographers, perhaps because they didn’t know better, lost out on a lot of financial possibilities, and the newspapers, magazines, news and picture agencies did just fine. Should it be that way? All depends which side of the street you’re on.

The amateur photographer who shot the video of two bombing suspects being captured was really clued into the way things worked. His apartment was across the way from where police, having used tear gas and having made the suspects undress to their shorts, had them come outside with their hands up. He took some 10 minutes of really dramatic professional looking video showing exactly how it went down

The amateur photographer understood the value of what he was onto and he emailed various news groups around London, starting a bidding war for sight unseen footage. Cutting a long story short, ITV News joined with the Daily Mail newspaper and bought the joint exclusive rights. If he had just emailed his video off to the BBC or ITV or a video news agency he could well have gotten nothing for his efforts.

ITV News made the video available to some of its international partners, clearly branded with the ITV/Daily Mail exclusive bug and that it was not to be used by others, but that didn’t stop news organizations around the world from stealing the material. One hopes the ITV/Daily Mail intellectual property lawyers are still hard at work snaring all those who stole the material.

But the point here is that there is big money to be made for exclusive pictures/video and the public at large really does not understand the type of money that could be at stake, and news organizations have obviously decided not to go out of their way to clue them in.

Indeed even ITV News itself says on its website to those who want to offer material, “By sending us your video footage/photographs/audio, you agree we can broadcast, publish, and edit the material and pass it onto others for similar use in any media world-wide, without any payment being made to you.”

And ITV and other news organizations that use similar clauses could conceivably make financial killings by not paying royalties and keeping all international sales money for itself.

A good example of how amateur photographers seem to have really little idea of the value of their work is the Air France Concorde crash in Paris in July, 2000, killing 113 people.

By sheer luck a couple of guys in a car near the runway saw the plane that had just taken off coming down in flames and they shot some still film. And then they contacted the Reuters Paris office and told them what they had.

a picture like this, taken by an amateur, can be worth a small fortune

A deal for really a small amount of money was made and Reuters had for a day or so the only pictures available of that crash. Apart from the pictures it put on its global news pictures service to all its subscribers it started making exclusive deals with magazines throughout Europe (it is the magazines more than television or newspapers that pay through the nose for exclusive news breaking pictures) and Reuters was onto a real cash cow.

But that all fell apart a day or so later when some video of the crash surfaced, taken from a moving car, and it was purchased by APTN. Suddenly those Reuters exclusive still pictures were overshadowed by the video. Magazines still paid handsomely for the stills, but not near as much as they were going to pay had the APTN video not made an appearance.

At the end of the day Reuters actually gave the still photographers some more money, and hopefully  the guys who shot the video made out like bandits from APTN, but these were pictures worth a fortune for the amateurs if they had been handled really correctly.

For the amateur, the first thing not to do, actually, is sell them to a global news pictures agency. The main goal for the news pictures agency is to ensure the pictures are in the hands of their newspaper and magazine clients around the world within minutes and since those clients are on subscriptions there is no more money involved. But the moment those pictures are published, whether on television or in newspapers, their residual value is dramatically reduced. The picture agencies can also work side deals with magazines, especially for those pictures that were not actually transmitted, but the value of the story is already reduced because the pictures have shown up on so many front pages of newspapers around the world.

The guy who sold the bombing suspect video to ITV/Daily Mail did the best he could by getting a bidding war going via email with the major British video outlets.

The best way to handle exclusive still pictures is to make a deal with a photo agency that specializes in magazine sales, not only in the home country, but has good contacts around the world for similar sales. It is the magazines that pay huge amounts for pictures, especially if those pictures are exclusive in-country, even though they will be used elsewhere. Revenue share, minimum guarantees etc., are all part of the game.

Now the regular guy on the underground train isn’t expected to know all this, and the news organizations have apparently made up their minds they are not about to let that genie out of the bag. The BBC says it received about 50 images during the first hour of when the underground bombs went off, and by the end of the weekend three days later it had more than 1,000 images and dozens of video clips, all sent by e-mail from mobile phones. The BBC has a firm policy that pictures it receives in that manner are royalty-free.

So what can the poor amateur do? There is some help at hand but far too early to tell how well it works. A new (Aug.4) British online site, Scoopt, invites the public to register and then they have the right to send in photos/video they have taken of news events and Scoopt, taking 50% of the revenue, says it will try and do media deals. Copyright remains with the amateur photographer which means each time a deal is made the photographer gets 50%.

Whether Scoopt is just focusing on just British media or if it has good international contacts is not known, but those international magazine contacts (or contacts with national agencies that emphasize magazine sales) needs to be a major part of its business.

It is, at least, a start.

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An American Competitor For Scoopt – October 6, 2005

Spy Media, based in San Jose, California has launched with the same idea as Scoopt -- to sell citizen-taken news pictures to the media

But whereas Scoopt does its selling via direct contact with editors, Spy Media places all its pictures on its web site and anyone can buy from the web site.

But either system means that citizens using their camera phones could now get hard cash for their efforts rather than giving them away directly to news organizations.

Scoopt claims it now has 2,300 members signed up representing 64 countries. According to a recent press release it has three successes so far including stills and video taken by camera phone of a train fire, and some exclusive pictures of supermodel Jodie Kidd’s wedding.

ITV/Daily Mail Said to Have Paid £65,000 For Exclusive Bombing Suspects Capture Video - August 23, 2005

Amateur photographers who happen to be in the right place at the right time, take note: The amateur photographer who shot the video of two London bombing suspects being captured, and who started a media telephone auction while it was all going on apparently did quite ok financially. He got £65,000 (around $117,000), according to Chris Shaw, senior program controller of Channel Five in the UK, writing in the UK Press Gazette.

Scoopt Signs Up 1200 members From 35 Countries In First Week - August 19, 2005

The idea of getting paid for amateur photos taken on mobile phones seems to be catching on. Scoopt says that within its first week of operation it had signed up 1,200 members from 35 countries and received 600 pictures.

But it also said that it had not sold any pictures. “At the moment we are not approaching anybody until we have the right picture,” Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae told the UK Press Gazette.

A furor has arisen with the Chartered Institute of Journalists and the National Union Of Journalists fearful that amateurs trying to cash in with Scoopt may put their lives on the line in dangerous circumstances. Be that as it may, more likely the unions are fearful that amateur photos, if they get used enough, might cost professional jobs.